Tranquility Base
It was July 1969 down on Lake Sinclair.
Outside was a night as loud as Mombasa.
Inside the astronauts came down a blurry
black and white ladder, likewise the old TV.
My crewcut years then at ten were just
a clutching of books near two-hundred
year old nesting-oaks. I lurked at the edge
of reddish water and miles-dark hardwood
under yin/yang skies. Later in that cabin
I tried to sleep, maybe channel astronaut
dreams but settled on the hawk
dreaming floodlit over the boathouse,
her shadow pouring out to find me.
Floridita
Small green rooms. Large space. The doorknobs are no
match for an ocean twenty miles west of this old river-house.
It sits half a block off the channel and feels the pull from
the only moon we’ve ever known. In the morning she
finds her voice again in sweet-water-springs now black
with buried canopy. Only a few walls of the Tamiami
persuasion survive along old forty-one where even rust
goes home. But from a thousand hinges, tacks and rubble
of a pulled-down garage long gone on the property line
comes a bloom.
Mornings at My Angkor Wat
Few places won’t yield to sky.
But these wide massive stands
confront almost any godhead.
The interior has little solid floor
unless you count canopies
given way to great leas.
Sometimes a dry-season patch
can expose a thirty-mile view.
Still, what hard vantage
the night gives. Even out here a glow.
I’d like to cut the feed. To shut down
the juice. And just be.
Holed up for good, mornings
at my Angkor Wat would make
a home here along the seldom roads
where I’d charge for admission to myself
so I can pay me back all the things
I’ve lost.
L. Ward Abel, poet, composer and performer of music, teacher, retired lawyer, lives in rural Georgia, has been published hundreds of times in print and online including The Reader, Snow Jewel, Indian Review, Versal (Two), Yale Angler's Journal, Istanbul Review, Ha!Art, and others, and is the author of nine chapbooks and one full collection of poetry, including Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UKA Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Little Town Gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), A Jerusalem of Ponds (erbacce-Press, 2016), and Digby Roundabout (Kelsay Books, 2017)